


The Mingled Measure

by threewalls



Category: Wicked Gentlemen - Ginn Hale
Genre: Anonymity, Community: kink_bingo, M/M, Scratching, Sensation Play, Siblings, human/demon, making difficult decisions, xenokink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-08
Updated: 2010-09-08
Packaged: 2017-10-11 16:04:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/114156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/threewalls/pseuds/threewalls
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Joan shrugged, as though she trusted her brother would know what she meant, when it was something that could not be spoken across the length of the salon even though they were alone. (Set pre-book; Joan is not yet married, William and Edward are still in college.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Mingled Measure

**Author's Note:**

> Written for kink_bingo, "anonymity". Significant character backstory/identity spoilers.

"Did you like none of them?" William asked.

Joan shut the book she had been reading. "Will, your friends are all charming, all well-bred young gentlemen. I'm sure Father will strongly suggest that I marry one of them. If we can trust anyone to keep my secrets, it will be one of your college friends. But, no, they're not--"

Joan shrugged, as though she trusted her brother would know what she meant, when it was something that could not be spoken across the length of the salon even though they were alone. Mrs. Kately had left them there with tea and a small plate of plain milk biscuits to tide them over until dinner, but there was no way of knowing whether or when they might be interrupted.

They had grown used to company this last week, while William hosted several of his friends on the estate. Younger than her brother, Joan was not yet out, too young yet in her father's opinion for that this year. But, as William had discovered this morning, Joan was not too young to hold strong opinions about the rights of women to choose their spouses rather than be chosen.

Joan was lucky to be a country lord's daughter. Her father allowed her to join them for the evening meal, and to play parlour games with William's friends on several of the nights, under Mrs. Kately's watchful eye. Joan had an unfair advantage at blind man's bluff, but she hid it well. William allowed that Joan was likely correct about her father's motivations in permitting her such freedoms. He had thought she would be pleased to hear that several of his friends had commented favourably on his sister's liveliness, but Joan would confess no particular favourites.

"Would you like me to marry Edward?" Joan asked. "He seemed pleasant enough. It did seem to me that you might favour him... as a brother-in-law."

William started at her implicit suggestion, colouring deeply.

"Did you like none of them for yourself?" he pressed, discomforted by his awareness of his own face.

Joan set down her book. It seemed only an instant, but she was there beside William, who obligingly moved to allow her room on the sofa.

"Would you like me to tell you a game I played last night?" Joan asked, inclining her head towards his and speaking softly. "I pretended that they really were like me, but too proper, too confined to show it. That under the gloves that held my gloves were nails equally clipped and bleached, and that if they had kissed me, that their breath would be smoke and their teeth sharp on my lips."

William could not look at his sister directly, but saw from the corner of his eye that Joan was smiling all too sharply.

"Did that help?" he asked, finally, when he trusted that his voice might be even.

"No, Will, it did not."

* * *

William groaned, the sound loud in the still air.

At the seminary, the young men shared with one other, a witness to keep them honest and humble. William shared his cell with Martin, who slept lightly but often enough in the library. Martin was all right, but William kept his encounters to the showers. The college servants gossiped, and it was a rare week that someone wasn't called up during chapel for indiscretions caught by the state of his sheets.

This past week, suiting opportunity to cruel temptation, William had arranged for dear blond, sweet Edward to sleep on the cot set up in William's bedroom. Such temporary measures were necessary in the house as they did not often entertain. Edward was so obviously oblivious to his own beauty that William had never wished to enlighten him. He simply watched and listened and remembered, waiting for more leisure than his morning shower. Mrs. Kately changed the sheets but once in the week, and she never commented on the laundry.

Fist jerking under his blankets, William thought of lying in bed, watching Edward returning from the water closet still dressed in his day clothes. First, Edward would sit on the cot and unlace each of his boots. He would modestly turn to face the wall, William pretending to look away as well, and Edward would begin to strip. His jacket, his vest, his shirt all folded neatly at the foot of the cot, his trousers, next, and, ah, then-- his face turning in profile, catching sight of William over his shoulder, Edward's innocent smile turning wicked as he bent at the waist, raising that delightful arse as he peeled down his underwear, peeled off his socks, his gloves. His hands were pale, barely pink, fingernails slightly curled, hints of black at their roots.

The thought rose from inside William, as if some possession of his viscera, the vision of Edward advancing with glowing eyes, sharp nails, sharp teeth. The ferocity of his bodily response overwhelmed and disturbed William. In his mind, Edward's eyes flickered between burning yellow and matte blue, his teeth and nails alternating black, white, black.

William choked the base of his member for control; revulsion suddenly spreading over him in sick counterpoint to his lust. Hands in fists thrust to the bed by his sides, William breathed hard, body throbbing still as his stomach turned over once and again, before slowly settling. Liquid burned at the corners of his eyes.

William was one of those men that his 'friends' in the seminary showers ridiculed for desires more perverse than their own sodomite sins. William laughed with them about 'those sick bastards who suck demon cock', allowing them to think he was like them, hoping he could be like them enough if he tried, but feeling a little colder, a little more hollow each time.

Edward was the only friend that William had never heard scorn Prodigals; Edward merely pitied them. The image of Edward's demonic double struck William anew like a lightning bolt through his guts-- he opened his eyes wide to stare at the blank ceiling of his bedroom, dispelling the vivid fantasy-- but he could not forget that Edward, as beautiful as a man could be, was human.

Joan was right. Settling for human men could not satisfy if William could not forget that he was choosing to settle.

William sat up, pushing back his sweat-dampened fringe and rolling his tensed shoulders. He poured himself a glass of water from the pitcher on the nightstand. He drank slowly, testing his settled stomach against small sips, and when it held, larger mouthfuls that he held before swallowing, wetting his lips and mouth. William spat into his hand and reached down between his legs.

Theology could wait for the morning, but he would not sleep aching and unspent.

William could do this with mindless friction, but he did not want to. He had more control over his imagination than that. Let it not be Edward's fair hair, William thought, but another, not Thomas' brown locks or Martin's black, a redhead, yes, like no man William knew by name. William shut his eyes, allowing his imagination to catch on a vivid mane of copper, flecked with silver and gold, a fiery halo. Not the green eyes William would have expected in a human lover staring down at him, but red coals, burning, burning about pinpricks of darkness.

William bit his lip, as the Prodigal's kisses would do, scraping fingernails of his left hand along his right forearm as William stretched that arm to stroke himself. They had been taught to pinch themselves if temptation visited them while they rested, pain as penance, a chastisement.

Scratching was better, so much better. It made William's skin feel sensitised, made him all the more aware of the sheets rubbing along his back as the muscles of his legs flexed.

He could almost smell the phantom Prodigal's hair, heady with smoke and sulphur. The boy's voice was a whisper in William's ear, urging him on towards his peak. William scratched deeper and deeper, feeling as if his own nails were claws, hooked and cutting into his flesh, pleasure shivering through him. He felt no shame, only the urgent desire to thrust harder into the grip of his fist. A vicious thrill spiralling from his arm to encompass all his shaking limbs, rushing William headlong into pleasure, his ears echoing with unholy sounds that he only belatedly recognised as his own.

William wiped himself with a handkerchief. He licked his nails; they did not taste of blood. Good. There was no imperative to move to contest his lack of will. His arm burned still, the illusion of flames.

* * *

William woke mid-morning. He washed his face and hands in his bedroom basin, and dressed for breakfast. Walking down the hallways to the breakfast room, his collar felt too tight, and the starched fabric of his shirt-sleeves itched even with cuffs unfastened.

William was not the only household member to have slept late. Joan glanced at him once over the rim of her book, nodding a smile before returning to her text and her toast.

From the side of the table nearest to William, he took toast for himself, and scrambled eggs and sausages, before reaching across for the butter, and again for the pepper. Joan giggled from behind her book. William stood debating whether he would prefer coffee or juice.

"Will?"

"Yes?"

He caught Joan's eye, the arch of her lip, and her suppressed laughter.

"You might want to ask me to pass you anything else." Joan finished nibbling her toast in two quick bites, wiped her fingertips on a napkin and then-- fingered the row of buttons that fastened her gloves. "Some of us have had a little more practice covering up."

William's sleeve had ridden damningly high. Joan could see only inches of the marks, but the discolouration was clearly visible. He had thought blood would be the only sign of his indulgence, but his right arm carried striated bruises from elbow to wrist. Caught out, William could think of no plausible excuse.

The communal showers at his seminary college had been such a revelation: steam and spray and bare slick flesh, blasphemy outside of certain knowing circles within the colleges. William enjoyed the bodies of his brother students. He enjoyed the bittersweet impossibility of his affections for Edward. For the first time since the boyhood impulse that had taught him to always wear gloves, William had felt in company.

At least, until last Easter term, when Abbot Gregory came before William's class to speak about the duties and responsibilities of brothers within the Inquisition, with a penitent Prodigal boy in tow. With bleached, trimmed nails and his thick chestnut hair tucked up under a cap, the boy had looked almost ordinary. Almost.

William had been among those that tarried after the lecture. He let the others ask their questions, feigning obedience as he tried to catalogue what the Prodigal boy smelt like (not very much different to William himself, and a little like the inside of a church). Away from the lectern, Gregory illustrated his answers with increasingly expansive gestures. William had been among those drawing back in surprise at the scratches, scars and scabs, that covered Gregory's bony forearms.

"Ah, these? Not all Prodigals are as penitent as John here," Gregory had said, laughing, dropping his hand on John's-- the Prodigal's-- shoulder. John had nodded without looking up from the floor.

"Will?"

Across the table, Joan's smile was now uncertain, and conciliatory. For once, she looked as young as she was. Joan was William's half-sister; for his sins, his desires, he had not her excuse of the affinity of blood.

"Thank you, Joan. I'll be more careful."

William smiled at Joan, so that she would return to eating. He fastened his cuffs. The cotton felt at first like burlap, but then no worse than his college robes. Four weeks until Michaelmas term, and if he wrote now, there would be time to change his specialisation. William would have to plead his case, but if he mentioned his father, Harper, William was sure Abbot Gregory would accept him into his classes.

"Juice, Will?"

What William would tell Joan's father, he did not know.

\---

MC  
8/09/10

**Author's Note:**

> This story makes reference to canonical, severe social and particularly religious constraints on homosexuality, xenosexuality, and non-human persons; it involves self-scratching/demon claws roleplay in a sexual context, not one of self-harm, but the character does have some sexuality-guilt issues, so YMMV.


End file.
